In Virginia, a Test of the Obama Machine (Atlantic Politics Channel)

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Wonga Extends Its Payday Loans To Small Businesses In UK

Wonga.com, the successful but controversial payday loans provider, is extending its credit service to small businesses in the UK. The move is a smart one given the current economic climate. Banks have been lambasted for not lending to small businesses - Wonga is simply going to try and fill in the gap - and take advantage. Needless to say this could end up being a huge business for Wonga. Despite attracting the ire of financial journalists - including the Daily Telegraph, which prevented it from winning its Startup 100 awards - Wonga has made as many as 4 million short-term loans to consumers since its launch in 2007.

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iPhone Growth in China: It Isn?t What You Think

The 8 million iPhones that Apple sold in China last quarter are a lot like exotic pets: They're cute and they make great gifts for rich young men to give to their girlfriends. But outside of their native ecosystem, their survival prospects don't look very good.

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Samsung's SGH-i667 "Mandel" Windows Phone surfaces, still shrouded in mystery

Sure, today's gadget news is saturated with Samsung's new Galaxy S III, but lest we forget that it's been a hot minute since its released a Windows Phone device. The last we saw were the Focus S and Flash, and that was right around when the Nokia Lumia 800 and Galaxy Nexus were still fresh in our minds. Well, this can only be classified as a potential leak, but two purported photos of another Samsung WP7.5 device, codenamed "Mandel," was recently posted at the WPXAP forums. While there's not much in the way of hard details, according to WPCentral, this is the white SGH-i667 that passed through the FCC during March with AT&T bands, but then apparently nixed before it could hit stores. Along with the photo, a screenshot from the Zune software shows it having only 8GB of capacity, which likely means it wasn't slated to be a premium offering. That's about all the info that's surfaced for now on the Mandel, but feel free to hit up the links below for more details and analysis. Here's hoping that Samsung will announce more love for Windows Phone soon.

Samsung's SGH-i667 "Mandel" Windows Phone surfaces, still shrouded in mystery originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 May 2012 05:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The 9 Weirdest Places in Reddit [WTFriday]

Reddit is the best possible argument anyone can muster against direct democracy: a perfect cross section of the internet and all horrible people on it. It's bloated with racism, depravity, more racism, but moreover with an incredibly diverse array of strange and absurd subcultures. More »

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$100 Pico Projector Beams Video at Full iPhone Resolution [Pico]

We've always felt that Pico projectors are a little uninspiring, but the Pop Video iPhone projector from Micron Technology displays higher-resolution than the rest, and is small and cheap enough to be practical More »

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Don't believe the headlines. Wind farms do not cause 'global' warming.

A recent study published in Nature Climate Change suggests that large wind farms could be pulling down hot air at night, raising the average temperature of the local region. The results of the study, however, have been widely misconstrued in the news media.?

All energy technologies have nuances and drawbacks. New research published in Nature Climate Change found that wind farms are no exception.

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Specifically, the study found that large tracts of wind turbines in remote areas of Texas appear to be increasing local surface temperatures. The results of this study have been misconstrued by certain media outlets as ironic evidence that a supposedly "green" technology is contributing to global warming, despite the lack of any supporting evidence.

Here are the facts: The team of researchers, led by SUNY Albany environmental scientist Liming Zhou, analyzed surface temperature data of Texan wind farms ? the data courtesy of NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. Zhou and his colleagues found that the immediate surroundings of the wind farms rose an average of 0.72 degrees Celsius between 2003 and 2011. The effect was most prominent at night. Some of the team has speculated that this localized warming trend could be an effect of the turbines pulling down warm air from higher altitudes at night, when the air above the land would otherwise be cooler.

In a recent University at Albany press release, Zhou warned that "the estimated warming trends only apply to the study region and to the study period, and thus should not be interpolated linearly into other regions (e.g., globally) or over longer periods (e.g., for another 20 years)," he said. "For a given wind farm, once there are no new wind turbines added, the warming effect may reach a stable level."

Yet exaggerated interpolation seems to be stock-in-trade for many of the media outlets covering this story. Take, for example, FOX News' headline: Wind farms are warming the Earth, or that of Forbes: Wind Farms Cause Global Warming! or that of the Inquistr's: Wind Farms May Contribute to Global Warming, or that of Newser: Latest Global Warming Culprit: Wind Farms.?It should be noted that nearly all of these stories contradict their own headlines by?explaining?that the observed effect was local.

This new study doesn't necessarily illustrate a causal link between wind turbines and localized warming, let alone temperature change on a global scale. The authors of the Nature paper were the first to admit that further science is needed to determine that exact nature of this link.

If it were true that the spinning blades of wind turbines increased the overall temperature of the planet, as opposed to simply redistributing thermal energy,?we would have to rewrite some basic laws of physics, particularly the?2nd law of thermodynamics.?This is an important distinction from the burning of fossil fuels, which produces gas that increases how much of the sun's energy the Earth retains. In this respect, this process contributes to a globally warming climate because the source of energy (the sun) is apart from the system that is warmed (the Earth.)

Rather than inform the public's perception on climate change, exaggerated coverage of this study has merely justified the common distrust scientists have for journalists.

The reality is that any alternative energy source is going to present problems. Over the past two years, there has been scientific investigation of whether wind turbines can affect the health of proximal residents, though the legitimacy of "Wind Turbine Syndrome", as it was called, was widely questioned. Natural gas has its problems with fracking, nuclear energy with radiation, and even solar cells with electronic waste. This recent study was merely exploring a similar issue in wind energy, but only so that we might effectively deal with it.

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